Monday, April 23, 2018

Star Crawl Space Combat Preview


I've done testing with the Star Crawl space combat rules and I'm pretty close to a final version. This is a big part of the rules and a pretty significant milestone in being ready to publish Star Crawl.  

I used the Vehicle Mayhem rules as a starting point: those rules are excellent at representing relative movement and tracking armor damage. The image above includes the play areas I'm using for space combat. The left board would be for combat, with ships maneuvering around each other. On the right is the pursuit tracker, used when ships attempt to escape combat. My goal is to keep space battles exciting and fast past while maintaining a tactical feel. As the rules tighten up, I'll post more specifics.


Ship stats will again be similar to Vehicle Mayhem, with simple "dot" armor tracking as a key concept. To avoid massive numbers of dots as ships grow in size, I've added Damage Denominator (DD) as a ship stat. The size and class of the ship determines how much damage is required to remove a point of armor. So, a plasma burst rolls 12 points of damage. This would do 2 dots of damage to a fighter with DD 5 or 1 dot of damage to a battlecruiser with DD 10.